The Top 200 Tracks of the 1990s: 50-21

"Race for the Prize" is not just the first song on the Flaming Lips' 1999 album The Soft Bulletin; it's the first song of the band's new life, its Bonham-sized drum stomp and weepy synth line heralding a surprise-- and increasingly successful-- third act in a career that could've easily degenerated into an alt-rock footnote. The fragility of the band's existence at the end of the '90s-- having spent the last vestiges of their post-"She Don't Use Jelly" goodwill on 1997's 4-CD experiment Zaireeka-- is reflected in the song's empathetic portrait of stressed-out scientists pushed to their physical and psychological limit in search of a cure for a disease. But if "Race for the Prize" questions the fortitude of its heroes-- "they're just humans with wives and children," Wayne Coyne repeatedly reminds us-- the song stands today as a totem to the perseverance of its makers. Music may never cure cancer, but as the Flaming Lips' post-millennial ascension has shown, one should never doubt its capacity for rebirth and renewal. --Stuart Berman

Some songs turn the small moments that make up the bulk of our collective existence into nuanced art. "Bitter Sweet Symphony" is not one of those songs. It's an anthem among anthems, a force that makes you want to pulverize all those puny moments, a screed aimed at steamrolling all other songs not bold enough to share its tyrannical worldview. It will never soundtrack a Wes Anderson film, not even ironically. It makes you want to break Guinness world records, run for national office, perhaps ride a space ship to Jupiter. It's all-encompassing. Richard Ashcroft's first line goes, "Cause it's a bitter sweet symphony, this life." Not "this chair" or "this flower" or even "this love." He's talking about life-- all of it. Right now. Everywhere.

It uses a sample of an orchestral recording of the Rolling Stones' "The Last Time", which itself was originally based on the Staples Singers' "This May Be The Last Time". Because the Rolling Stones have excellent lawyers, "Bitter Sweet Symphony" is now credited to Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, and they get all the money it earns. But its piecemeal origin story (and dubious credits) lends credence to the idea that this song is actually nobody's and everybody's. Like it's a product of civilization itself. Evolution's baby. A full-length mirror for all humankind. Too much? Of course it is. --Ryan Dombal

Some songs, you remember them being longer than they actually are-- not because they're tedious, but because they're momentous, filled with little gems and turns of phrase that refuse to leave your head. The LP version of "It Ain't Hard to Tell" that closes out Illmatic is less than three and a half minutes, but it feels eternal, Nas synthesizing every intelligent gangster, hood-Scorsese storyteller, and verbal acrobat that came before him into some of the most unpretentiously advanced lyricism of the decade. You could pick any line at random to use as an example of his untouchability-- "My mic check is life or death, breathin' a sniper's breath/ I exhale the yellow smoke of Buddha through righteous steps"-- and even individual words resonate; the moment where Nas snaps "invasion" has become a favorite Madlib drop. The Large Professor's beat is legendary, too, not just for the oft-cited sample of Michael Jackson's "Human Nature", but for some of the most subtly devastating drums put to tape. --Nate Patrin

Posthumously parsing Elliott Smith songs-- for foreshadowing, for anything-- feels like something of a fool's errand in 2010, but "Needle in the Hay" is still a song about addiction sung by someone whose drug use played at least some part in his eventual undoing (it doesn't help that Wes Anderson chose it to soundtrack a particularly grim suicide attempt in 2001's The Royal Tennenbaums). Smith's voice is heartbreakingly brittle, and each crack feels like a gut-punch; "You ought to be proud that I'm getting good marks," Smith seethes, drawing out the s, mimicking-- intentionally or not-- the hiss of heroin cooking in a spoon. It's excruciating to hear, but that's part of the point, of course, and Smith's particular brand of confessionalism is so touching-- and his skill as a folksinger is so undeniable-- that "Needle in the Hay" is triumphant in spite of itself. --Amanda Petrusich

Before "Girls & Boys", Blur were a successful UK indie band; after it, they ascended to the ranks of international cultural force, singer Damon Albarn was a person of interest, and Pet Shop Boys' remix of the song was effectively a passing of the UK-chart-pop-as-rhetoric torch. "Girls & Boys" is a party song about the delights of omnisexual hedonism, but it's smarter and more cutting about the circumstances of omnisexual hedonism (pre-packaged travel, unemployment, language barriers, drugs, kids whose idea of "romance" comes from condom packages) than any other song of its kind. It's also a tart, sneering rocker, full of ingenious musical gestures: an undiluted disco bass part, bounding octaves and all; trilling synths echoed by Albarn's fake-ecstatic oh-oh-ohs; that monomaniacal right-left-left-right barrage of a chorus. --Douglas Wolk

Ah, the sound of sheer terror. "I'm only 19 but my mind is older/ And when the things get for real/ My warm heart turns cold." That's Prodigy, the 5'6", sickle cell anemia-afflicted Queensbridge resident who, for the five minutes and 26 seconds of "Shook Ones Part II", is the most dangerous person on the planet. Threatening to "stab your brain with your nose bone," P raps like a sullen zombie, on the loose and hungry for flesh. But "Shook Ones" is not a phantasmagoric song-- it feels utterly real, with stakes in the streets, around the wrong corner, in immature and dangerous hands.

That P and Havoc, his producer and rapping partner, were not terribly intimidating up close, means nothing. It's all in the sound. Hav created a song that is hard to describe as anything other than simmering-- a menacing, John Carpenter-esque piano line tumbles underneath a seething snare drum and what sounds like a rusty bandsaw off in the distance. A true slow burn. Nearly everything the two say has become a quotable threat or a sliver of rap vérité. Mobb Deep have built a career on similarly evil-sounding songs, continuously creating their own Hell on Earth. When the producers of 8 Mile chose the song's instrumental as the backing track for B. Rabbit's fateful final battle, they knew they'd chosen something powerfully dark-- "Shook Ones" means one thing and only one thing: Fear. --Sean Fennessey

For almost as long as Doug Martsch has been described as a guitar hero, he's denied it. Based on this Built to Spill song, he's probably right. Diehards love Martsch's Television-taut interplay with partner-in-axe Brett Nelson, and rightly so. But it's sweetly warped singalongs like "Car", from 1994's There's Nothing Wrong With Love, that not only put this Boise band on the map, but also helped give birth to an entire Pacific Northwest indie-rock sound. Just because a song is emotionally communicative doesn't mean it's straightforward, and Martsch's wide-eyed lyrics here are as winding and off-kilter as the guitar work: "You get the car/ I'll get the night... off," he begins. Cello adds tonal color as the song builds to its Inception-ready climax-- not a chorus, but a mantra: "I wanna see movies of my dreams." There's still nothing wrong with love. There's nothing wrong with brainy, independent types making near-perfect pop songs, either. --Marc Hogan

The take of "Ladies and Gentlemen We are Floating in Space" that leads almost all official copies of Spiritualized's 1997 masterpiece feels only like a preamble. "All I want in life's a little bit of love to take the pain away," moans Jason Pierce again and again, eventually intertwining elliptical verse about loving until dying and the uncertainty of the future around the listless, daydream hook. It builds, stalls and empties into the album's electric opus, "Come Together". But the version Pierce hoped to include was squashed by Elvis Presley's estate for its use of the melody and lyrics of "Can't Help Falling in Love". Officially released in 2009, the pan-Presley rendition feels like the encapsulation of not only an album and a career but, really, rock'n'roll, too. Pierce has spent a career teasing out the connections between healthy adoration and destructive obsession, between disaster and redemption. Surrounded by the sighs of strings, harmonica and a slide guitar and backed by a gospel choir singing some of the most desperately romantic lines in history, Pierce inserts himself into a woebegone lineage-- and devastates. --Grayson Currin

Let's quickly acknowledge two men who helped make this song possible: the Marquis de Sade and Frank Black. De Sade, according to Kim Deal, is the "little libertine" the lyrics are messing with. ("Later on I found out he used to suck the snot out of people's noses, and I thought that pretty much ruled.") That makes this the best of her many sex-and-power songs, but if you've never thought much about the lyrics, you have plenty of good reasons: I don't think more than 10 seconds ever elapses here without some left-field hook or break leaping out to grab you, and every one of them is snappy enough to have been the gimmick for someone else's whole single. Hat tip to her old bandmate Black for that part-- after two albums' worth of not being allowed much input on Pixies songs, "Cannonball" sounds a little like Deal bursting with a billion great ideas that couldn't be neglected anymore --Nitsuh Abebe

It seems very wrong to reduce an important band's highest-charting single to one sound, but sorry, that whooshing progression that repeats through "1979" is amazing enough to hang a whole career on. That floating guitar figure seems to hold all the wistfulness, sadness, hope, and redemption that the Smashing Pumpkins wanted to get across in the 1990s, and everything else-- and they released a ton of great music then, don't let the last 10 years obscure that-- was pretty much gravy. Somehow that riff and the song's title-- '79 was a pivotal year for Corgan's generation, signaling the end of the last decade that would be spent only in childhood-- must have motivated Billy Corgan to speak in straightforward and human terms. Here he wasn't whining, he wasn't throwing a tantrum, he didn't want to be the voice of a generation or be someone's therapist. Instead, he put together a cluster of images that was more about an undefined feeling than a message, and it happened to be the most universal sentiment he'd ever manage. "1979" was Billy Corgan asking, "You know this feeling?" and the second you heard that guitar line the immediate answer was, "I do-- tell me more." --Mark Richardson